Question

We have a problem/misunderstanding with our current git setup. We have local master and a local feature/user branches. The branches are connected to different default remote branches. If I checkout the master and want to pull the latest changes, git tells me that I am ahead of the remote master. Looking at the diff of a file that I expected to be pulled from the remote, I see that it is still an old file, not having the latest changes from the remote.

Here is my sample workflow + output:

$ git checkout master
Already on 'master'
Your branch is ahead of 'origin/master' by 8 commits.

I do not want to push, but I want all files updated locally:

$ git pull origin/master
From git://...
* branch      master -> FETCH_HEAD
Already up-to-date.

Now let’s look at a file (somefile) that should have been updated:

$ git diff origin/master somefile
# this is not supposed to show anything but it results in a diff output

diff --git a/... b/...
index ...
---
+++
@@ -1,9 +1,8 @@
 ...    
-remoteText that I actually want to have
+localText that I wanted to be updated/replaced
 ...

Here is the origin config:

$ git remote show origin
* remote origin
  Fetch URL: git://...
  Push  URL: ssh://...
  HEAD branch: master
  Remote branches:
    juve                               tracked
    horst                              tracked
    master                             tracked
    temp                               tracked
  Local branches configured for 'git pull':
    master            merges with remote master
    feature1-juve     merges with remote juve
  Local ref configured for 'git push':
    HEAD forces to master (fast-forwardable)

Does this mean that the somefile is (wrongly) modified by one of the pending commits?
Unfortunately, before doing the described git checkout master some “wild” merging and branch switching has been going on that I could not track anymore (the whole setup is actually not my own, but my colleagues, who often impatiently clicks around in his Eclipse egit). I believe that some “cross merging” has been done that produces old content to appear in the pending commits for the master branch.

Can you tell me what is wrong here? Where is my/our misunderstanding?

PS: The colleague did a reset and is now working again on her code. Therefore, I cannot easily present you the related git log --pretty=oneline merge logs.

Answer 1

In your case, git pull doesn’t need any args, so you may be confusing things by passing the origin/master arg to it.

It shouldn’t need args because git already knows what remote branch your local master branch refers to (this is origin/master). You can see this in your .git/config file.

Also, I would suggest doing git pull --rebase instead of a regular old git pull. This will ‘replay’ the 8 new, local commits on top of the latest master and force you do deal with any conflicts. You don’t have to deal with any extra conflicts this way (if you had to deal with them, you would have gotten conflicts with a regular git pull too). The gain with this is that you save face and don’t introduce an un-necessary extra merge commit into the history.